Trinity prof's new book: Assad has 'degraded Syria'

Syrian president Bashar al-Asad (left) meets with Trinity history professor David Lesch in Damascus. The Syrian leader is the subject of a new book by Professor Lesch titled The New Lion of Damascus.

A local Middle East expert once saw reason to hope Syria's president would reform the harsh regime he inherited.

Not anymore. David Lesch, a professor of Middle East history at Trinity University, now sees dire outcomes likely from a conflict out of control.

He believes he's gotten to know President Bashar Assad better than most Western analysts in the mid-2000s. He faced criticism this year for what some called a too-cozy relationship with the Syrian government when hackers publicized 2008 email correspondence they looted from a Syrian server.

But in his latest book, Lesch, 52, describes his sadness and anger at the way Assad has handled the 18-month uprising and civil war that the United Nations estimates has killed 19,000 people, many of them civilians.

In “Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad,” published in August, Lesch outlines Assad's rise to power and what led to the country's bloody breakdown, describing Assad as a tyrant “reviled as a bloodthirsty killer” who has “degraded Syria.”

Before ascending to the presidency upon his father's death in 2000, Assad was an ophthalmologist. He had studied in London, was head of the Syrian Computer Society and was a fan of Western music, Lesch said.

“All these things perhaps raised too high an expectation of him in the West,” said Lesch, taking a break this week from a whirlwind publicity tour for the book.

Lesch has traveled to Syria for more than two decades. He received special access to the president, his wife and others high up the chain of command in 2004 and 2005 and wrote a book about Assad titled “The New Lion of Damascus.”

He described his role as an unofficial liaison between Syria and the West for the remainder of the decade and regarded the Bush administration's pressure on Syria as unhelpful.

He saw Assad's leadership as bearing the promise of reform — but as Assad's time in power wore on, Lesch wrote, he detected smugness in a man he'd previously considered unpretentious.

Lesch's access to Assad ended in 2009, but he continued to meet with high-level Syrian officials until last year.

“Rather than changing the authoritarian system, as many of us had hoped and perhaps expected, the authoritarian system changed him,” Lesch said. “Perhaps, in order to succeed in that system, he felt he had to conform to it.”

Lesch said he wrote to Syrian officials after the protests began and urged Assad to make dramatic changes, such as setting presidential term limits, but received no response.

In a column published March 30, 2011, on the New York Times' op-ed page, he described the dictator as being at a crossroads between repression and a “new direction,” adding, “Mr. Assad's background suggests he could go either way.”

Assad likely will try to hang on to power as long as possible, and the civil war will be long and drawn out, he said, because neither Assad nor the factionalized rebels can deliver a knock-out punch.

“It's going to be very hard to stitch back together this sectarian Humpty Dumpty,” he said of Syria's multiple ethnic and religious groups. “It might take a generation before Syria gets back on its feet.”